My position is pretty straightforward: I’m not against expanding the College Football Playoff. I’m against expanding it to the point that a national championship becomes a realistic possibility for teams that haven’t had a championship-caliber season.
There is a difference between making a playoff more inclusive and making the regular season less meaningful.
College football has crossed that line.
And perhaps the most frustrating part is that the people making these decisions seem convinced that more playoff football automatically means a better product.
It doesn’t.
The beauty of college football was never simply the championship at the end of the season. It was everything that happened along the way. It was the pressure of September, the anxiety of October and the chaos of November. It was knowing that one Saturday could completely change the trajectory of a season.
Now, we’re entering an era in which teams can lose four games, potentially five depending on how the selection committee evaluates the field, and still have a legitimate argument for playing for a national championship.
That’s not necessarily a better playoff.
That’s a different sport.
We’ve Replaced the Two-Loss Debate With the Four-Loss Debate
Remember when the biggest controversy in college football was deciding which two-loss team deserved the final playoff spot?
Those arguments could consume an entire week. Fans debated strength of schedule, head-to-head results, conference championships, quality wins and the eye test. Every résumé was dissected. Every loss mattered. Every Saturday carried consequences.
Now, we’re preparing to have the same arguments about four-loss teams.
Think about that for a moment.
Under the new 24-team format, 19 spots will be awarded to at-large teams, with four automatic bids reserved for the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12 and SEC champions and one for the highest-ranked Group of Six champion. That leaves the selection committee responsible for sorting through a massive pool of teams to determine who gets the final invitations.
We’re going to spend November arguing whether an 8-4 SEC team deserves to get in over a 10-2 team from another conference. We’ll debate whether a fourth loss against a top-five opponent should be forgiven. We’ll hear about strength of schedule, injuries, quarterback availability and quality losses.
And the committee will have more power than ever to determine which programs get a chance.
Here’s the problem: The more teams you include, the more difficult it becomes to establish a meaningful cutoff.
There will always be a team ranked 25th that believes it belongs. There will always be a team ranked 24th that probably doesn’t. And there will always be an argument about why one résumé deserves more consideration than another.
The four-team playoff created controversy because too many deserving teams were left out.
The 12-team playoff reduced that problem.
The 24-team playoff might create an entirely different one: too many teams getting in without having done enough to deserve it.
I’m not suggesting that every team in a 24-team field will be undeserving. There will be legitimate national championship contenders outside the top 12. There will be Group of Six programs that deserve an opportunity to compete against the sport’s biggest brands. And there will be compelling first-round matchups.
But there is a difference between deserving a postseason opportunity and deserving a national championship opportunity.
Those two things shouldn’t automatically be interchangeable.
Oklahoma Is the Perfect Example of the Problem
Let’s bring this closer to home.
Oklahoma is currently 5-4 overall and 3-3 in SEC play. In the previous era of college football, the Sooners would have been playing for pride, recruiting momentum and a respectable bowl destination.
Now, they’re still alive in the national championship conversation.
From an Oklahoma perspective, that’s fantastic.
Every remaining game matters. The locker room has something tangible to pursue. Fans have a reason to remain invested. A team that has experienced its share of disappointing Saturdays can still envision a postseason run.
I understand the appeal.
If Oklahoma wins its remaining games, it can finish with a respectable record against one of the toughest schedules in the country. The argument that a team should be evaluated within the context of its competition is legitimate.
But let’s not confuse an opportunity with an accomplishment.
If a 5-4 Oklahoma team can realistically envision winning a national championship, what exactly are we saying about the importance of the nine games already played?
That’s where the conversation gets uncomfortable.
Oklahoma’s losses haven’t suddenly become irrelevant. They should still matter. But the expanded playoff gives the program a much larger margin for error, and that changes the psychological makeup of the regular season.
Instead of playing to avoid elimination, teams will increasingly play to improve their position.
That’s an important distinction.
A November rivalry game used to have the potential to destroy a season. Now, it might simply determine whether a team enters the postseason as the No. 14 seed instead of the No. 19 seed.
Those games will still be entertaining. They’ll still matter to fans. But the consequences aren’t the same.
And consequences are what make sports compelling.
The Conference Championship Game Is Another Casualty
Perhaps the most revealing part of this decision isn’t the number of playoff teams. It’s what the sport is willing to sacrifice to accommodate them.
For decades, conference championship weekend was one of the defining events on the college football calendar.
Winning the SEC meant something. Winning the Big 12 meant something. Winning the Big Ten meant something.
Those championships weren’t just stepping stones to the national championship. They were accomplishments in their own right.
A conference title represented an entire season of work. It gave programs, players and fan bases something tangible to celebrate, even if a national championship wasn’t in the cards.
Now, that tradition is facing an uncertain future.
With the 24-team playoff set to begin in 2027, it is widely expected that the Power Four conferences will discontinue their traditional championship games to accommodate the expanded postseason calendar. While the conferences have not formally eliminated those games through the CFP’s announcement, the writing is on the wall.
And that’s a shame.
We’re potentially trading four meaningful championship events for additional playoff inventory.
I understand the financial motivation. ESPN’s $1.7 billion agreement over five years provides the financial incentive to make this transition possible. That’s an extraordinary amount of money.
But at what point does college football stop asking what makes its product special and start asking how many more games it can sell?
The conference championship games could become another casualty of a sport that increasingly measures success by postseason access rather than accomplishments earned throughout the regular season.
And that’s a significant loss.
More Football Doesn’t Always Mean Better Football
There is one argument in favor of expansion that I won’t dismiss: campus playoff games are fantastic.
Sixteen playoff games will now be played on college campuses, including first-round and second-round contests. That’s a tremendous opportunity to bring postseason football to the places where the sport’s traditions were built.
Remember last year when Oklahoma hosted a playoff game? That atmosphere was be incredible.
The same can be said for games played in Tuscaloosa, Athens, Columbus, Eugene or Happy Valley.
Those environments are part of what makes college football different. Giving more fan bases the opportunity to experience playoff football in their own stadiums is a legitimate positive.
But there’s another side to this.
Under the new format, a team seeded ninth or lower would need to win five consecutive playoff games to capture a national championship. Add that to a 12-game regular season, and we’re potentially looking at a 17-game season.
That’s a significant physical commitment for college athletes.
The top eight seeds receive a first-round bye, but the teams that enter through the first round face an especially demanding road.
At some point, we have to ask whether we’re expanding opportunities for players or simply expanding the amount of football we’re asking them to play.
The irony is that the sport continues to evolve into a professional enterprise while maintaining the language and traditions of amateur athletics.
We’re asking players to endure longer seasons, travel farther and compete for more weeks, all while the television contracts and institutional revenues continue to grow.
That doesn’t mean expansion is inherently wrong. It means the people making these decisions should be equally concerned with the consequences for the athletes who actually play the games.
College Football Doesn’t Need to Be March Madness
I know the comparison is coming.
People will point to the NCAA basketball tournament and argue that the beauty of March Madness is that everybody has a chance. Cinderella stories happen. Underdogs win. A team that wasn’t expected to make a run can suddenly become a national sensation.
And I love March Madness.
But college football isn’t basketball.
The sports have different rhythms, different physical demands and different traditions. More importantly, college football’s regular season has always been its greatest selling point.
In basketball, a team can play 30 regular-season games and still have a meaningful postseason opportunity. The sheer number of games makes that model work.
College football doesn’t have that luxury. Every game requires an enormous physical investment. Every Saturday is an event. The limited schedule is part of what makes each matchup matter.
You can’t simply transplant the postseason philosophy of one sport onto another and assume the result will be better.
The 24-team playoff will undoubtedly produce exciting moments. There will be upsets, dramatic finishes and unforgettable campus environments.
But those moments won’t automatically make the overall product better.
Sometimes, the value of a sport is found in what it doesn’t give you.
It’s found in the fact that you can’t afford to lose.
And college football is rapidly abandoning that principle.
The Sport Is Getting What It Wants. I’m Not Sure Fans Are.
Here’s what I believe will happen.
The 24-team playoff will be incredibly successful from a television perspective. More games mean more inventory. More teams mean more fan bases invested. More opportunities mean more compelling storylines for networks to sell.
ESPN gets a bigger postseason. Conferences get additional revenue. Universities get more opportunities to justify their enormous investments in football.
And fans get more football.
But getting more of something doesn’t necessarily mean getting something better.
I don’t want college football to return to the four-team playoff. I don’t believe 12 teams is necessarily the perfect number, either. There is room for improvement in the selection process, and there are legitimate arguments for giving more programs access to the postseason.
But 24 teams feels like overcorrection.
We’ve gone from debating which undefeated or one-loss team deserves an opportunity to potentially debating which four-loss team deserves one. We’ve gone from celebrating conference championships to finding ways to eliminate them from the calendar. We’ve gone from a sport in which November could make or break a season to one in which November might simply determine where a team starts its playoff journey.
And that’s the part I can’t get behind.
The greatest thing about college football was never the playoff. It was the regular season.
It was the fact that Oklahoma could lose to Texas and spend the next week fighting to get its season back on track. It was the fact that Alabama couldn’t afford to overlook an unranked opponent in November. It was the fact that a rivalry game could carry national championship implications.
Those stakes made college football different.
Those stakes made Saturdays matter.
Now, we’re creating a system in which a team can stumble through September, struggle through October and still have a reasonable path to a national championship in December.
Maybe that’s good business. Maybe it will produce some incredible playoff games. Maybe, five years from now, we’ll look back and wonder how we ever lived without 24 teams.
But I suspect we’ll also look back and realize that somewhere along the way, we stopped protecting the things that made this sport special.
College football didn’t need more teams playing for a national championship. It needed to preserve the importance of earning the opportunity in the first place.
We’ve made the playoff bigger.
I’m just not convinced we’ve made college football better.